Archive of thenextweb.com
Written on 12th December 2008
23 COMMENTS 
Patrick de Laive, Internet entrepreneur and co-founder of The Next Web Conference. Twitter: @patrick
She wants me to invite her. Should I do it?
ASmallWorld is one of those famous social networks for the rich and famous from all over the world who help each other out on a lot of stuff. Although I’m rich nor famous I got an invite to the network about 2 years ago anyway. Must be my good looks. ;-)
I started using it and build my profile and my network. After my buddy list on Skype, friends on Hyves, business contacts on Linkedin, marketing business and German contacts on Xing, my international friends on Facebook and my Twitter follow list it was just another network where people could find me.
Different than other Social Networks?
Is it any different? Well, not really. The user interface is poor, usability idem, but in the end it is about the people who are on that network. The network has been ‘invitation only’ since the start and invitation rights are hard to get. Exclusivity is the main driver of the network. The main difference would be that the average income of the people in the network is probably a factor n higher.
I got invites!
Last june I got invites to ASW and now I can invite up to 10 people in the network. I blogged about this on my personal blog and I was surprised to find out that that particular post got 22 comments (make sure to check them) of people begging to get an invite and more than double the traffic I normally get (My mom is the only one reading my personal blog normally).
Today I got an email with this subject:
I offer EUR 500 for an invite to ASW
What!!! I must say it is very tempting, but I think I’ll skip this one. Unless someone has a higher bid?
Written on 31st October 2008
0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
I’m not a morning person. The moment my iPhone’s terrible “alarm” rings, I curse the day. There’s only one reason why I make it to the office, or anywhere besides my bed. Music.
It fuels my life. And those of my friends. We exchange music every day – our drop boxes are working overtime. The Hypemachine, a secret new music service, and some specific friends on Twitter supply us with inspiration for new songs and albums. There’s only one downside.., my iTunes collection is a mess.
In comes TuneUp
Actually, my iTunes collection was a mess. Ever since I’ve discovered TuneUp, I can browse my collection Cover Flow style without being agitated by the lack of covers.
TuneUp is a management tool that let’s you clean dirty tracks (like the ones that have the artists’s name in the song title), find missing cover art, receive upcoming concert alerts, and enjoy music videos.
The PC version is available in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and English, so most of your European folks can use the service in your native language. People from Holland, Scandinavia, and Eastern European countries must remain patient for a while.
Still in beta, we have 50 invites
TuneUp for Mac is still in private beta, meaning it made my Mac crash once and it loads very slowly. But still, my collection looks way better now. So grab yourself one of those Next Web invites to try it our yourself. Send an email to thenextweb@tuneupmedia.com, the first 50 will be invited to the TuneUp Mac Beta.
The normal program is free for 500 songs/50 album art cleans, and $19.95 for unlimited (Gold version).
Written on 22nd September 2008
2 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
As you may have read a few weeks ago we now send out a regular newsletter. Every Friday we collect some statistics from the site and figure out what the most popular post was. We email this to everyone who has attended a conference before, to The Next Web LinkedIn group and to people who sign-up for our weekly newsletter here at the site.
What we haven’t made clear yet is that if you sign up for the newsletter you will also receive invitations to The Next Web Salon events and The Next Web Conference before anyone else.
The first Next Web Salon was sold out within 48 hours and the second one, which was held last Friday, was sold out within 20 hours! We first send out an invitation to our mailing list and then, if we still have tickets left, we post the invitation to our blog.
As soon as we have more details about The Next Web Conference 2009 we will send out an invitation to our mailing list first and post it to the blog and send out a press release later.
If you want to make sure you are invited first to all our events do sign-up for our newsletter!
Click the image on the right here to see an example newsletter and sign-up here:
Sign up for our weekly Next Web Update. Just the highlights!
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Written on 16th July 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
California-based Wisia offers a simple way to use the wisdom of crowds. Just ask a question, the Wisia community will give you some answers. That’s basically all there is to it. So let’s dig a little deeper in this process, since we all have questions torturing our minds, right?
Three phases to come to an answer
Ok, so you’re thinking about asking that girl/boy out, what’s the best way to do that? Sounds like a simple question, but the question template of Wisia can turn asking it into a real challenge. This is the best form I could come up with, suggestions are welcome.
After asking the question, the community gets the opportunity to give some suggestions for the definite answer. 
Users only have to speak up and add some links to documents that prove their point. This is phase one.
Phase two is easier, just voting for what you consider to be the best answer. After 99 other people did the same, a ranking of the answers appears. That’s phase three. Now it’s up to the one who asked the question. Will he or she take the most popular answer for granted?
For the bright side of life
As you probably expected by the whole question asking-process, Wisia is suitable for the lighter questions of life. Some examples of running topics:
- The hottest men that every woman should fantasize about!
- Celebrities that should take classes on how to contribute to society.
- What beer should become my next favorite?
In short, Wisia is fun to play around with, or to find out what the public opinion about a certain matter is. And the good news is you can do that too. Dahwun Kim from Wisia was so nice to offer The Next Web 50 private beta invites. So browse to the sign-up page and type in thenextweb. Good luck rallying the crowd.
Written on 25th June 2008
4 COMMENTS
Robin Wauters, Next web enthusiast & Plugg organizer
TripSay, the recently unveiled social travel networking service, has added a ‘groups’ feature at the request of its beta users.
TripSay nicely caters to its community with a slew of social features, and the Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube integration works seamlessly. With the introduction of groups, users can now form mini communities within TripSay around any topic (e.g. Golf, Iron Maiden World Tour 2008, Hiking, etc.) and choose to do so publicly or privately between friends. According to the company, this also removes part of the irritation with anonymous reviews and recommendations, since it allows you to share your opinion with people you know and trust.
TripSay, which operates out of Finland, says it intends to move from invite-only to public beta this Summer. The business model will evidently consist of highly-targeted travel-related ads and affiliate fees to travel booking sites. TripSay faces competition from an emerging group of social travel sites, such as Driftr, HereOrThere, YowTrip, Rummble and others.
Would you like to be part of the thousands of beta users who are exploring TripSay today? The first 100 readers who send an e-mail to info [at] tripsay [dot] com with “nextweb” in the subject line get an invite.
(TripSay founders Leo Koivulehto and Juha Huttunen, photo credit Elliottng @Flickr)
Written on 20th May 2008
3 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Last month, bloggers found themselves a new start-up sweetheart: New York-based socialmedian. Everybody from Louis Gray to VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha was raving about it, saying this service was an enrichment of the existing social news landscape. Funny detail though, socialmedian has been in Alpha all the time. It probably helped that Jason Goldberg – former CEO of Jobster – is the founder. I’ve sent him a line to ask how he has experienced this early coverage.
Jason Goldberg
The idea of socialmedian is to offer people a new way to keep up with personally relevant news about specific topics. Users can join different news groups – currently 653 different ones – and add stories by “clipping it”. Unlike Digg, is not about a popularity contest but more about what users with similar interests like. As mentioned before, this service has been described more than a dozen times, so read more on Mashable, ReadWriteWeb or VentureBeat. So how is it like to get coverage from this major blogs in such an early stage?
Goldberg: “The press we have received is very kind and unexpected at this stage. We think that part of it coming so early is because our product appeals to journalists and bloggers who seem to immediately “get it” and we have a number of them participating in our alpha and they’ve asked if they can write about it. Some of the press is also due to the fact that we’re trying to solve a problem that a lot of people have — there’s so much information out there that it has become very very hard to filter out the noise and hone in on personally relevant info; so, there’s a lot of interest in what we’re trying to do.”
If you’re interested in trying out this new service, I’ve good news for you: Goldberg supplied us with 200 invites. He explains why: “One of our key initiatives is to give socialmedian a global appeal. We already have more than 25 percent of our users residing outside the U.S., our plan is to continue to that trend as we want socialmedian to be useful for anyone anywhere to easily find and discover personalized news of interest.”
Well it’s not just the invites for European users that helps creating a global appeal, an office in Pune, India also sure counts. Or is it just typical outsourcing? Goldberg: “Our team in Pune is not an outsourced operation, rather an offshore extension of our company. The team there are all shareholders in socialmedian and we are building a company and product together. I go to Pune for one week out of every four weeks and it is working very nicely thus far, albeit a bit tiring, but that goes with the territory.”
Although creating another news filter site sounds a bit risky to me, Goldberg and his team seem to do a good job. What I especially like are the email functions. I don’t have to browse to another site or add ANOTHER feed, I just receive a short summary in my inbox every morning. Socialmedian even asks me whether I “want milk with that”.
Want socialmedian to go with your breakfast as well? Browse to the site and click on “create an account”. Enter your invite code “amsterdam” and become one of the 2700 alpha users. Just like 25 percent of these fella’s, you might come back every day.
The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
